When faced with the threat of corruption and oppression, would you fight for your freedom? Or would you keep your head down hoping for things to pass over? Keylocker is a cyberpunk turn-based RPG where you fight against the caste system and bring down the hierarchy. With rhythm game aspects mixing together with turn-based combat, Keylocker promises to be an interesting experience as you dive deeper into the game.
Story
Keylocker starts off with a cold open, launching the player right into a prison break by our main character, B0B0. She’s been locked up due to making music, which is the highest offense on Saturn, since music is used to generate electricity. But today is the day that her brother and (unwilling) partner in crime, Dealer, helps her break out. Destroying the courses of electricity, B0B0 is able to topple the prison, literally, and falls right back into her home town in the Scrapyard.
The story can sometimes be a bit hard to follow, or overwhelming in its information dumps. It can feel as though you’re jumping right into the middle of things rather than seeing things right from the start. The way that you receive information about specific individuals is given in such a way that can be confusing at first. You’ll hear about the Satellites, your enemies in the game, and told what feels like the entire backstory of each individual before even catching a glimpse at them. The same can be said for your friends in the Scrapyard, and even the background of the planet Saturn and its inhabitants in general.
Quests
As you explore around the world of Keylocker, you’ll occasionally pick up quests from other characters. The quest log is simplistic, giving you a summary of the task that you need to perform. There is no way to actively track your progress, with the text remaining the same (when it comes to quests associated with the main story).
Outside of that, the quest log doesn’t offer much use, especially if you’re hoping to get a hint as to where you need to go to next. In terms of the main story quest, the game is very linear. So once you complete a task in the area you’re in, very rarely will you need to backtrack to another area to progress, with your next steps taking place in previously blocked off areas. However, there are times where the way forward is not immediately obvious and you have to poke around before you realize that there is an open space for you to move forward.
Gameplay
Keylocker is a turn-based rhythm RPG where you must time your attacks with precision in order to deal and reduce damage. There is a mix of encounters and mandatory battles that you must battle through in order to continue exploring the world of Keylocker. As you explore, you’ll pick up items that you can use to heal, increase your stats, or equip to take into battle. While the game doesn’t tend to be upfront in some cases as to where you need to go, it is linear enough where you can follow the newest corridor that unlocks for you. With the completion of specific areas, you’ll put on a music show, in the form of a rhythm game.
Combat
Keylocker allows you to have up to two characters in your party, usually being a mixture of the main characters, depending on where in the story you are. There are some cases where additional characters may join you in battle, but they’re temporary and you’re not able to select what moves they use in battle (although you still need to hit the button at the right point). All characters have HP and EP, with HP being your health and EP being your shield. Once EP is depleted, health will start depleting.
When a battle opens up, all characters will be on their own designated square. The battle field will be a random grid format, with you and your enemies able to move to any open spaces in the squares touching where they are. During each turn, you can choose to use an item, move a square, use an offensive or defensive attack, or wait. Using an item doesn’t count as your full turn, so if you find yourself low on health, it’s always a good thing to heal first. Any other action will take up a turn. Offensive attacks will deal damage to either an opponent’s HP or EP (or both depending on the amount of damage dealt) while defensive attacks will either heal your EP/HP or put you in a counter position. With countering, if you take an attack, you will automatically deal damage back to your opponent. So it can be strategic to use, especially if countering would deal more damage than just attacking outright. Of course though, you have to make sure that the opponent would be in your attack zone, otherwise the attack will miss.
As you defeat enemies, you’ll level up (although there isn’t any indication that you have leveled up), increasing the damage you deal while reducing the damage you take. After a while, it feels as though regular enemies don’t do much of anything to you in battle, just bosses. And since you can’t run from battles, every battle that you end up wandering into is one that you must complete in order to progress.
Unfortunately, the main thing holding Keylocker back is the combat and specifically, its timing feature. In order to deal any substantial damage (and avoid taking any damage), you have to hit your attack button at just the right moment. For most attacks, this is whenever the character attacking flashes white. If you’re even a millisecond off, the game registers it as either early or late (or worst of all, miss) and deals damage depending on the status. Early and late statuses deal less damage than a perfect status, with ‘miss’ usually resulting in no damage. For blocks, early and late statuses result in minor damage, while missing will deal much more. A perfect block will deal no damage.
In theory, this isn’t too bad, especially since the animations for all attacks should operate at the same speed. However, there are some battles where the game slows down due to performance issues, resulting in what feels like a laggy response. Early game, hitting the button late or not at all will result in death, while late game, the only consequence are longer battles. Thankfully, if you do lose a battle, you can restart the fight right from the start rather than starting from a save.
Exploration
After breaking out of the prison, your job is to explore around and figure out a way to overthrow the Satellites. You can talk to other characters, gleaming more about the world of Saturn, and sometimes picking up side quests. Scattered all over stages are milkshakes and oil juice to heal and treasure chests with weapons and armor. As you collect items, the danger meter on the right will slowly increase. Once the danger meter passes level 0, there will be surveillance bots flying around. Walking into their light results in a random battle. Once you get done with battle, the meter will decrease slightly.
The surveillance bots are annoying as a mechanic, as it can be hard to avoid the lights. The bots tend to fly in the direction that you’re moving, and if you’re trying to avoid them, they’ll likely catch you off guard by suddenly moving right in front of you. Once the danger meters goes back to level 0, the bots will disappear.
There isn’t much depth when it comes to the exploration part, with your next objective usually a path that was previously blocked off. You can explore around and talk to people, but there’s usually only one way that you can go to progress the story. Even when you land in new cities or dungeons, you aren’t given free reign. You’ll have to fight against mini bosses before you can open up the way.
Upgrades and Skill Tree
Along with leveling up, you are able to equip up to two weapons and two armor pieces. Each weapon has their own stats, and you can mix and match weapons as you see fit. Along with having its own stats and its own animations, specific weapons can ignore the EP value and deal direct damage. Along with your weapons, you can attach passive abilities to weapon slots, so that they trigger randomly during battle whenever you use a move. These skill can vary from abilities that prevent your enemy from moving to skills that deal additional damage.
The skill tree allows for a bit more uniqueness when it comes to upgrades. With the skill tree, you’re able to increase your stats or attach passive abilities to specific weapon slots. You unlock and level up skills using keys, which you can pick up while exploring and by winning battles. However, keys are shared between all main characters. If you find that you’ve misused your keys, there are some points in the game where you’re able to refund the keys used for characters to try and manage them better. As you unlock more skills, better skills tend to cost more keys.
Rhythm Game
At the end of some areas, you’re able to put on a music performance in the form of a rhythm game. But unfortunately, the rhythm game is just as frustrating as the combat timing system. It acts like your typical rhythm game, with one button mapped to a specific lane. You’ll have to time your hits just right to build up your combo, which can lead to greater scores. However there are times where it feels as though even when you press the button at the right time, the game doesn’t register your hit, causing you to lose your combo. At the end, the game will tell you the percentage of notes that you hit our of 100%.
Aesthetics
Keylocker uses pixel art and the palette that it makes use of is very cyberpunk-coded. There’s a lot of playing with complementary colors, especially with purple and green. The environments of Keylocker are very nice to look at, with a nice variety from the desert to deep in the city. Each location feels grungy in its own way and are elevated by the cast of characters staring each area. While enemy variety isn’t big, new enemies trickle in enough so where there is a nice surprise in each area.
Music
Since this is a rhythm game, the music is one of the highlights of the game. With heavy use of synth, guitar, and drums, it’s a nice mix of relaxing and groovy. Each track feels like one that you’d listen do while driving down the highway on a motorcycle, with no cares in the world. Given the dark atmosphere that tends to hang around in the game, the soundtrack sets the tone and shines.
Conclusion
Keylocker has some interesting ideas and accomplishes a few things, such as the atmosphere and music of the game. But when it comes to the gameplay, it stumbles to a point where the game ends up being a drag a good portion of the time. While a fun way to bring some excitement to a turn based game, the performance during battle makes it so that one moment it feels as though everything is lagging and the next, things are back in time as they should be. Alongside that, rhythm game portion has some kinks of it’s own to work out, with some button presses not registering when they should. It’s definitely the type of game that will find its audience, but for some people, it may be one that doesn’t quite click.
Rating: 7/10.
